Still, the balance of evidence certainly seems to show that a little
very rude and almost shapeless hand-made pottery has really been
discovered amongst the buried caves where palaeolithic men made for ages
their chief dwelling-places. Fragments of earthenware occurred in the
Hohefels cave near Ulm, in company with the bones of reindeer,
cave-bears, and mammoths, whose joints had doubtless been duly boiled,
a hundred thousand years ago, by the intelligent producer of those
identical sun-dried fleshpots; and M. Joly, of Toulouse, has in his
possession portions of an irregularly circular, flat-bottomed vessel,
from the cave of Nabrigas, on which the finger-marks of the hand that
moulded the clay are still clearly distinguishable on the baked
earthenware. That is the great merit of pottery, viewed as an historical
document; it retains its shape and peculiarities unaltered through
countless centuries, for the future edification of unborn antiquaries.
_Litera scripta manet_, and so does baked pottery. The hand itself that
formed that rude bowl has long since mouldered away, flesh and bone
alike, into the soil around it; but the print of its fingers, indelibly
fixed by fire into the hardened clay, remains for us still to tell the
story of that early triumph of nascent keramics.
The relics of palaeolithic pottery are, however, so very fragmentary, and
the circumstances under which they have been discovered so extremely
doubtful, that many cautious and sceptical antiquarians will even now
have nothing to say to the suspected impostors.
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